“Back to the Future”: Technological Singularity in Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy Mojca Krevel
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“BACK TO THE FUTURE”: TECHNOLOGICAL SINGULARITY IN GIBSON’S SPRAWL TRILOGY MOJCA KREVEL Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana Abstract: Ray Kurzweil’s concept of singularity as presented in his 2005 “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” is based on complex calculations relying on the existing patterns of biological and technological evolution. His predictions about the course of future human development remarkably correspond to the worlds of the 1980s cyberpunk literature. The paper analyses William Gibson’s “Sprawl Trilogy” in the light of Kurzweil’s predictions for the future and explains its correspondence with the structural logic of postmodern reality. Key words: cyberpunk, genetics, hyperreality, nanotechnology, robotics, singularity 1. Introduction A few months ago, while randomly flipping through TV channels, my attention was caught by flickering trajectories of brain-computer interfacing and pulsing images of neurons firing to computer-generated data. The cyberpunk fan in me cheerfully acknowledged the familiar phantasmagoria of what seemed to be a yet-unseen documentary on 1980’s sci-fi avant-garde - only to find out that what I was, in fact, watching, was a film version of Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 best-selling The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Technology. The resemblance between Kurzweil’s vision of the future and the worlds of literary cyberpunk, epitomized by those in William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy, was astonishing. The astonishment was primarily owed to the fact that Ray Kurzweil is an award-winning inventor, mathematician, and one of the leading experts in computer and artificial intelligence. He is also a remarkably accurate - and hence influential - futurologist whose predictions have been based on existing trends in the development of technology and science. William Gibson, on the other hand, is the most influential author of the 1980s cyberpunk movement. His early work provided the blueprint for what were to become the trademarks of cyberpunk writing: computers, computer(ized) environments and artificial intelligence. And yet, even while fuelling digital fantasies of thousands of aspiring computer geeks, Gibson wrote most of his Sprawl trilogy on a typewriter and consciously avoided using the internet well into the 1990s. His hi-tech literary worlds were admittedly inspired by Alfred Bester’s 1950s sci-fi serial “Tiger! Tiger!”, William Burroughs’s concept of the Interzone, and the down-and-out aesthetics of the “Velvet Underground” band (Gibson 1995:318). In this paper, my intention is first to show to what extent Kurzweil’s informed and well-grounded projections coincide with the largely-invented motifs in Gibson’s 1980s Sprawl Trilogy. The analysis will be followed by an attempt to explain the correspondence in terms of the metaphysical structuring of the postmodern age. B.A.S. vol. XX, 2014 28 2. Ray Kurzweil and the concept of singularity Because singularity is a concept which not only means different things in different disciplines and to different people, but is also rarely encountered in literary criticism, a brief explanation is in order. In mathematics, singularity refers to a value that exceeds any final limitation (Kurzweil 2006:22), while in physics, the concept “marks a point where the curvature of space-time is infinite, or, in other words, it possesses zero volume and infinite density” (Hawking et al. 1997). Kurzweil’s use of singularity follows Vernor Vinge’s appropriation of the term to “describe the point in history where accelerating technological progress becomes near infinite and thus unknowable” (Vinge qtd. in Bell 2003:6). This definition refers to the explosion of intelligence, implicit in the functioning of Kurzweil’s theory of the law of accelerating returns, according to which the rate of evolutionary development is doubly exponential as each subsequent improvement takes less time and less effort. Kurzweil (2006:14-21) divides the history of evolution in six epochs, which differ according to the complexity of information patterns. We are currently nearing the end of the fourth epoch. The state of singularity corresponds to Epoch Five of evolutionary development, in which the exponential growth will be so great that technology will seem to develop at “infinite speed” (24). This will result in the merging of the data in our brains with the non-biological intelligence of our technology. Epoch Six refers to the aftermath of singularity, in which the computational potential of the matter and energy in the universe will be employed for the spreading of intelligence once the computational potential of the Earth no longer suffices. Epoch Six is the last epoch with existing intelligence that one can imagine. Kurzweil’s predictions rely primarily upon the development and the increasing synergies of three disciplines which have been the most vigorously researched and the most generously financed over the last twenty-five years: biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics. The advancements in biotechnology are principally focused on genetics - i.e. the reading and manipulation of the genome - and they started with the Human Genome project in 1990. The possibilities of interfering with genes thoroughly redefine the established notions of life, living, metabolism, age, heredity, illness, etc. Nanotechnology, which is essentially about controlling matter at atomic and molecular levels, has been the fastest developing and also the most heavily financed scientific discipline since the 2000s. Understandably so, as the basic modus operandi of nanotechnology promises results that are nothing short of magical - imagine the implications of the possibility to transmit instructions from a centralised data store to molecular nano-assemblers (nanobots) which would build whatever is coded from the atomic level up. Robotics primarily involves the development of a non-biological intelligence that exceeds human intelligence, the so-called strong artificial intelligence (narrow AIs are already used in air traffic control, medical diagnoses, etc.). A number of approaches and models have been developed over the last 60 years to create an intelligence that would be indistinguishable from human intelligence. Kurzweil clearly favours the reverse engineering of the human brain, which involves the usage of nanobots in coding all the processes in the human brain, providing a blueprint for the functioning of strong AI. The launching of the heavily financed international BRAIN project in April 2013, the goal of which is to decipher the 29 (UN)REALITY INTENSIFIED code of the human brain by employing the tools of nanotechnology (Kozmos 2013:13), may see results that come in well ahead of Kurzweil’s 20-year estimate. 3. Kurzweil’s singularity @ Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy Kurzweil’s predictions predominantly rely on possibilities offered by the technological and scientific discoveries of roughly the past 25 years. Prior to 1990, most of the propositions discussed in The Singularity is Near would have been unthinkable in terms of the possibilities offered by existing technology and science. Nevertheless, as I will show over the following pages, Gibson’s 1980s novels Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) - generally referred to as the Sprawl Trilogy - contain a number of concepts which are not only comparable but more often than not identical to those proposed by Kurzweil. The theme that loosely connects the novels are the efforts of various AIs (e.g. Wintermute, Neuromancer, Continuity) to break free from human control and merge with extra-terrestrial AIs to create an intelligent universe very similar to the one of Kurzweil’s Sixth Epoch. They pursue their goals by employing human operatives (e.g. Case, Molly, Turner) and personality constructs (e.g. Dixie Flatline, Colin, The Finn), whose task is to sabotage various corporations. These operatives are either completely dehumanised or run by ancient clans sustained by cloning and cryogenics, such as the Tessier-Ashpools. For the analysis of Gibson’s Sprawl novels in terms of Kurzweil’s predictions in The Singularity is Near, I distributed the latter in seven categories based on the three disciplines discussed above and their combinations (see Table 1 below). I then searched for concepts corresponding to Kurzweil’s proposals in the three novels. Employing such categorisation facilitated the organisation of the concepts analysed, while providing immediate insight into the extent of Gibson’s innovation. The analysis resulted in roughly eighty concepts and phenomena that structurally and functionally correspond to Kurzweil’s predictions. With some, it was impossible to determine whether their functioning relied upon the same factors as Kurzweil’s, or whether a concept or phenomenon should be regarded novel or not. An example of this is the re-setting of Julius Deane’s DNA in Neuromancer (Gibson 1995:20) and the rejuvenation of Danielle Stark in Mona Lisa Overdrive (Gibson 1989:185). In any case, the quantity of corresponding concepts may well contribute to the impressiveness of the degree of coincidence, but it is rather trivial to the actual quality of correspondence, which is the main concern here. This is why presentation and evaluation is limited to key corresponding concepts, with an emphasis on those which had no grounding in the 1980s technological and scientific reality. B.A.S. vol. XX, 2014 30 KURZWEIL GIBSON GENETICS cloning 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool gene manipulation DNA manipulation NANOTECH intelligent textiles